“Young layabout,” the agent was saying as the snow played around his jowls. “Slaughtered the livestock and let the place fall to wrack and ruin. I’d as soon see him hung as evicted.”
Joost didn’t answer, his black staring eyes masked by the brim of his hat, the sharp little beard clinging like a stain to his chin. Erratic posture bowed his back like a sickle and he sat so low in the saddle you wouldn’t know he was coming but for the exuberant plume jogging between his horse’s ears. He didn’t answer because he was in a vicious mood. Here he was out in the hind end of nowhere, the sky like a cracked pitcher and snow powdering his black cloak till he looked like an olykoek dusted with sugar, and for what? To listen to the yabbering of the fat, red-faced, pompous ass beside him and bully a one-legged boy out into the maw of the great barren uncivilized world. He cleared his throat noisily and spat in disgust.
By the time they reached the naked white oak that in better times had shaded the Van Brunt household, the snow had begun to taper off and the temperature had dropped another five degrees. To their left, against the fastness of the trees, was the half-finished fieldstone wall begun by Wolf Nysen before he went mad, butchered his family and took to the hills. He’d cut their throats as they lay sleeping — sister, wife and two teenaged daughters — and left them to rot. When Joost’s predecessor, old Hoogstraten, had finally found them, they were so far gone they might have been molded of porridge. People said that the Swede was still up there somewhere, living like a red Indian, swathing himself in skins and killing rabbits with his bare hands. Joost glanced uneasily about him. Dead ahead lay the charred bones of the cabin poking through the skin of snow like a compound fracture.
“Here,” puffed the agent, “see what they’ve done to the place.”
Joost gave it a minute, his horse picking through the drifted snow like an old man stepping into a bath, before he responded. “Looks like the patroon ought to give up on this place. It’s nothing but bad luck.”
The agent ignored him. “Over there,” he said, pointing a thick finger in the direction of Jeremias’ lean-to. Joost dropped the reins and thrust his numbed hands into his pockets while his horse — a one-eyed nag with an overactive appetite and dropsical mien — bobbed stupidly after the agent’s mare.
“Van Brunt!” the agent called as they hovered over the empty lean-to and the snowy hummock that represented the corpse of the unhappy ox. “Show yourself this instant!”
There was no response.
The agent was blowing up a regular hurricane of exasperated breath, summoning up terms like brass, effrontery and cheek, when Joost pointed to a half-filled track in the snow at the rear of the lean-to. Beyond it was a similar print, and beyond that another. Upon closer examination, and after a full sixty seconds given over to reasoning in the deductive mode, the agent determined that these were young Van Brunt’s footprints; viz., the mark of one shoe — the left — roughly paralleled by a shallow trough connecting a pair of pegholes.
Though the snow had stopped, the wind had begun to kick up and the sky was darkening toward evening. Joost was of the opinion that they should leave well enough alone — the boy was gone, that’s all that mattered. But the agent, scrupulous as he was, felt obliged to make sure. After an exchange of opinion on the subject — Where do you expect him to go, Joost asked at one point, back to Zeeland? — the two set off at a slow plod to track the boy down and evict him properly.
The trail wound like a tattered ribbon through the forest and into a dense copse where grouse chuckled and turkeys roosted in the lower branches of the trees. Beyond the copse were hills uncountable, balled up like hedgehogs and bristling with timber, home to heath hen, pigeon, deer, pheasant, moose, and the lynx, catamount and wolf that preyed on them. And beyond the hills were the violent shadowy mountains — Dunderberg, Suycker Broodt, Klinkersberg — that swallowed up the river and gave rise to the Kaaterskill range and the unnamed territories that stretched out behind it all the way to the sun’s furthest decline. Looking into all that wild territory with its unknown terrors, with darkness coming on and his toes gone numb in his boots, Joost spurred his horse forward and prayed the trail would take them toward the glowing lights and commodious hearth of the upper house.
It didn’t. Jeremias had headed south and east, skirting the big house and making instead toward the van der Meulen farm. Joost and the agent saw where he’d stopped to make water in the snow or nibble a few last withered berries and chew a bit of bark; they saw how the pegleg had grown heavier and dug deeper into the snow. And finally, to their everlasting relief, they saw that the tracks would indeed lead them across the Meulen Brook, past the great plank doors of Staats van der Meulen’s barn and into the warm, taper-lit, bread-smelling kitchen of Vrouw van der Meulen herself, a woman renowned all the way to Croton for her honingkoek and appelbeignet.
If they expected hospitality, if they sought the warmth of Meintje van der Meulen’s kitchen and smile too, they were disappointed. She greeted them at the door with an expression every bit as cold as the night at their backs. “Goedenavend,” said the agent, doffing his hat with a flourish.
Vrouw van der Meulen’s eyes shot suspiciously from agent to schout and then back again. Behind them they could hear the muffled lowing of the van der Meulen cattle as Staats forked down hay from the barn’s rafters. Meintje didn’t return the agent’s greeting, but merely stepped back and pulled the door open for them to enter.
Inside, it was heaven. The front room, which ran the length of the house and occupied the lion’s share of its space — there were smaller sleeping quarters in back — was warm as a featherbed with a good wife and two dogs in it. Flickering coals glowed in the huge hearth and the big blackened pot that hung over them gave off the most intoxicating aroma of meat broth. There were loaves in the beehive oven — Joost could smell them, ambrosia and manna — and a little spider pot of corn mush crouched over a handful of coals on the hearthstone. The kas doors were open and the table half set. In the far corner, an old water dog wearily lifted its head and two white-haired van der Meulen children gazed up at them with the look of cherubim.
“Well,” Meintje said finally, closing the door behind them, “whatever could bring the honorable commis and his colleague the schout to our lonely farm on such a night?”
Joost’s back was not nearly so bowed as when he was mounted, yet he still slumped badly. Working the plumed hat in his hands, he slouched against the doorframe and attempted an explanation. “Van Brunt,” he began, but was cut off by the officious agent, who laid out the patroon’s case against Harmanus’ sad and solitary heir as if he were pleading before a court of the accused’s peers (though of course there was neither need nor precedent for such a court, as the patroon was judge, jury and prosecutor on his own lands, and paid the schout and hangman to take care of the rest). He ended, having in the process managed to edge closer to the hearth and its paradisaic aromas, by attesting that they’d followed the malefactor’s trail right on up to the goude vrouw’s doorstep.
Meintje waited until he’d finished and then she plucked a wooden spoon from the cupboard and began to curse him — curse them—Joost, to his horror, equally indicted in her wrath. They were the criminals — no, worse, they were fiends, cloven-hoofed duyvils, followers of Beelzebub and his unholy tribe. How could they even think to hound the poor orphaned child from the only home he knew? How could they? Were they Christians? Were they men? Human beings even? For a full five minutes Meintje excoriated them, all the while brandishing the wooden spoon like the sword of righteousness. With each emphatic gesture she backed the agent up till he’d given over his hard-won place at the hearth and found himself pressing his buttocks to the cold unyielding planks of the door as if he would melt into them, while Joost slumped so low in shame and mortification he could have unbuckled his boots with his teeth.